


hand-me-down tune

by mjolnirbreaker



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 19:49:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18372893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjolnirbreaker/pseuds/mjolnirbreaker
Summary: He wonders if this is a sibling thing. Like, now that he automatically has six younger siblings does that mean he loses six things from his closet? Did Nancy and Jonathan make this sacrifice? Is this something everyone knows about except for him? Does he even care?





	hand-me-down tune

**Author's Note:**

  * For [floralathena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/floralathena/gifts).



“It’s really goddamn cold.”

“I think I have frostbite on my fingers. If we have to amputate them can you guys try to make it quick?”

“Like, we all take one finger and just count to three?”

“Can someone do mine for me? Sorry, Lucas. It sounds really gross.”

Steve could be in the warmth and quiet of his own bedroom right now. He tries not to fantasize too much because it tends to make every bad situation feel a million times worse. Thinking about being under his thick duvet and additional knit blanket while currently stomping through three inches of snow is only making the snow feel colder. 

He doesn’t even know why they’re doing this. It’s probably the fifth, maybe sixth time they’ve set out on a perfectly good weekend day that could be used laying around and watching television to wander around Hawkins and “check” things that don’t need to be checked on. And, okay, it makes sense. Here are five children who have had to experience two of the most terrifying supernatural anomalies, one of which only ended exactly two months ago today, and they’re bound to be afraid still. They’re bound to check that the door is locked at night and occasionally feel like anything with walls is actually a tunnel full of floating white Upside Down shit and sometimes remember the sight of a dead monster on the Byers’ living room floor and suddenly lose all appetite for at least a day. 

Steve does all those things, at least. Going around town and methodically checking to make sure there are no lingering signs of interdimensional turmoil doesn’t really help him sleep at night, but if it helps the kids then fine. Whatever. 

“Right here.” Mike announces suddenly, halting everyone at a seemingly random spot in the Benningtons’ field. Steve is pretty certain that this constitutes as trespassing. He hopes the Benningtons are friendly and inviting farmers as opposed to scary, shooting at trespassers with a rifle farmers. 

“Why right here?” Steve asks. Mike ignores him. The rest of the kids don’t seem to need an explanation because they’ve all panned out and began systematically checking every square inch of the ground. Steve doesn’t know what they’re looking so hard for. If the Upside Down were here, it would probably look just like it had the night that they went down into the tunnel. But there isn’t any blackened ground or gaping holes or white flakes floating around. It’s just a normal field on the coldest fucking day of the year. 

Steve doesn’t know what to look for. He wishes they hadn’t had to park the car a mile away because now would be the perfect time to ditch the Nancy Drew shit and recline his seat all the way back. Instead, Steve has to settle for sitting on the cold grass and simply watching the kids scout around. 

Except for Will, who promptly sits down beside Steve after only two minutes of trailing Mike. Steve is still learning things about each of them. His success rate on getting to know them is varied. While Dustin likes to verbalize every thought and feeling as it enters his brain, Will likes to sit in comfortable silence and let everyone else figure out how he’s doing. This silence isn’t as comfortable, though, and Steve isn’t always the best as figuring things out. He’s going to try anyway. 

“Bored of staring at grass, Byers?” 

“Yeah.” Will is sitting with his knees hugged to his chest. 

Steve knows it’s risky, but he nudges the kid with his elbow and asks, “Does this even help you? Coming out here?”

Will looks up at him, eyes all wide like he wasn’t expecting anyone to ask him that. It’s not that the other kids are purposefully ignorant of what Will needs--Steve thinks it’s the opposite, actually. They’re trying to do this _for_ Will. It’s obvious in the number of times Mike glances over his shoulder at Will as they’re all walking toward their destination, in the way Max pointedly doesn’t call these excursions stupid until after Will has been dropped off, in the way Lucas and Dustin double down on their jokes to distract Will from the possibility of finding something. They mean well. 

Steve just thinks maybe this isn’t the best approach. Exposure therapy doesn’t work for everyone. When ten-year-old Steve was terrified of the deep end of the pool, being pushed in by his father didn’t really solve anything. It just left him coughing up chlorine for twenty minutes. 

“I don’t know.” Will says, focusing hard on his answer. “At first I thought it did. It’s just…”

There’s a terrifying split second where Steve thinks the kid is about to cry. Instead, he just shrugs and plainly says, 

“It’s cold. And when we’re out here, I’m already thinking about the Shadow Monster and…”

“And it made you cold.” Steve realizes. Steve has always been more of a winter person than a summer person (humidity is bad for anyone who cares about their hair as much as he does) but he’s never been possessed by a monster that feeds off the cold. And the kid is shivering right now because he’s wearing a little hoodie that’s probably doing next to nothing to shield Will from the freezing temperature. 

Steve shrugs off his letter jacket and promptly lowers it onto Will. It’s comically big on him, probably will look ridiculous when he’s standing up, but it’s warm. Only the best point guard in Hawkins High School’s past seven years can be awarded the luxury of a _deluxe_ letter jacket. That’s what Coach Jackson told him, anyways. Now the luxury is awarded to Will Byers, local hero and monster defeater. 

“Are you sure?” Will asks even though he’s already buttoned the jacket around himself. 

“Yeah. I’ve been too concussed to play basketball, anyway.”

 

“Jesus _Christ,_ Max.” He tears the paper towel in his hands in half and promptly folds it, trying to dull any rough edges. As gently as he can manage, he dabs at the spots on her knuckles where bright red dots continue to swell no matter how many times he applies pressure. 

“I thought you’d be better at this.” She grumbles. “Considering your experience.”

“Yeah well last time I got into a fight, I woke up to find bandaids already miraculously on my face. Crazy how that works, isn’t it?”

Steve is trying not to let on how freaked out he’s been for the past fifteen minutes. Arriving at the Hawkins Middle parking lot and not immediately seeing the kids in their usual spot was the source of his first spike of panic. Finding them around the corner of the school and seeing two slightly bigger, obviously meaner kids leering over Lucas was the second. And then seeing Max promptly deck one of those kids in the face and get decked in return was the third and ultimately the most jarring. 

Steve had immediately shoved himself inbetween Max, who was already being yanked back by Mike and Lucas, and the other kid who was now sporting a crooked nose. His partner stood several feet away at this point and apparently being confronted by an adult compelled Max’s opponent to join. The boys walked away in silence, the battered one throwing a look of contempt over his shoulder while Max yelled and struggled to get out of the grip of now _three_ people. 

Her nose was bleeding all over her shirt and Lucas was noticeably somber and Steve felt like he was going to have a heart attack trying to manage all of this at once. 

The story was that these two kids (Trent and something, maybe Carl? Clark?) have been consistently unkind to Lucas and any other kid in the school who doesn’t fit their criteria of acceptability: whiteness. And an insult had been thrown while the kids were walking to the car, to which Max retorted with an insult of her own, and then pretty soon they were all standing face-to-face with mounting tension and _something,_ Steve can’t figure out what, made Max decide that punching was the only option. 

Steve feels like a bad influence. 

“Well your nose isn’t bleeding anymore, at least.” Steve carefully puts pressure on the bridge of her nose with his index finger, surprised when she doesn’t push him away. “That hurt?”

“A little. Not that bad.”

“It doesn’t look broken.” Which, thank God. 

“I wish it was. Then I could sue.”

_“Max.”_

“Do you know what they said to him?” Max demands. Now she _does_ push Steve away, both hands shoving at his shoulders in a weak burst of frustration. Evidently she decides that hitting him is not the best course of action, because she clenches her fists and crosses her arms over her chest. 

The floor of the middle school boys’ bathroom is probably the least sanitary place to be sitting, but he needed somewhere with access to water and paper towels and a lock on the door to keep nosy, potential targets for Max’s rage out. The other kids are waiting in the Camaro with the radio pumping his workout mixtape and the heat on. Steve put Lucas in the front seat and told him to turn the music up as loud as he wanted. He wonders if the boys can feel Max’s tangible rage from all the way out there. 

“Look, they’re little assholes, okay? I know, but--”

“But what?” Max cuts him off sharply, glaring at him with blood still dried in a line down her chin. “Stay calm? Don’t get involved? Is that what _you_ did with Billy?”

“Kid that was--that was _so_ different.”

“How? What they said to Lucas is what Billy always said _about_ him. Since when are you the only one allowed to protect him? Who gave you the punching racists license?” 

Steve hates that he’s agreeing with her. On the one hand, he shouldn’t encourage the kids to get into situations of violence. If he does that, they’ll start winding up with multiple concussions and chronic migraines like he has now. But on the other hand, he wants them to defend themselves and defend each other and sometimes to do that, you have to deck people. You just have to. 

“Listen, I’m not saying what you did was wrong. At all.” That immediately douses a bit of the fire in her eyes. Encouraged by that, Steve inches forward a little and rests his hand on her shoulder. “You just have to be careful, okay?”

“I just.” Max sighs sharply and points her gaze toward the floor. “When you punched Billy, it was--it was really cool, okay? It was the first time someone stood up to him, you know, for me. I want to do that for Lucas.”

Steve wants to hug her, but she has blood all over her shirt. So he pulls off his green sweatshirt, which wasn’t doing the best job of keeping him warm without the letter jacket anyways, and shoves it over her head. It’s freezing in just his tee shirt and he’s already mourning the stains that’ll have to be hand-washed, but the sight of Max with less blood calms his anxiety a little. More importantly, it allows him to pull her into a hug that she immediately groans at but allows. 

“This shirt smells like boy.” She mumbles against his shoulder. 

“You are such a little shit.” He sighs. When he was younger, he asked his parents for a little sister. They’d given him a cat that he was allergic to instead. He remembers hating that cat and feeling, if anything, an even greater desire for a little sister who would definitely cause him less grief and exasperation. 

He was wrong about that, but he stills likes Max a lot more than the cat. 

 

Steve is suspicious when the kids want to come over. 

“You have this giant house and we never use it!” Dustin had insisted last night over too-greasy pizza. “It’s dumb! What’s the point of being rich if you don’t use it?”

“And El could come.” Mike added. “Hopper says if we’re just staying at someone’s house, she can hang out with us.”

And Steve had felt like, sure, that all made sense but why now? Why his house instead of the Byers’ or the Wheelers’ like always? Even Hopper’s cabin has occasionally been used as a headquarters, though that usually ends in Hopper smoking on the porch because children are too goddamn loud. 

Whatever their underlying motives, Steve is just relieved they don’t want to go wandering around town again. He’s low on outerwear and his throat has been sore for the past two days. 

The kids invade his room with enough determination that he doesn’t really stand a chance at stopping them. He just watches helplessly as they invite themselves in to his only sanctuary, his fortress of solitude, his personal castle, and open his closet doors. 

“What the hell?” He makes no effort to stop them, only flops onto his bed and watches while they begin tugging things out and distributing them amongst themselves. The only ones who refrain from this barbarism, he realizes belatedly, are Will and Max. 

“Holy _shit_ this is soft.”

“There’s too many sports shirts in here.”

“Is this a crop top?”

“Hi.” Steve raises his voice and effectively grabs their collective attention. “What is this? I didn’t agree to a flea market.”

“Will and Max got clothes.” Eleven explains. It doesn’t sound accusatory (although the look Dustin is giving him is decidedly accusatory) but rather like a statement of fact. She’s very gently guiding him to the conclusion. Of course it would be sweet, sweet Eleven to let him in on this plan that they’ve apparently had since last night.

“You _want_ my clothes?” Steve looks at Will and Max, who both think this is very funny. 

“They think it’s favoritism.” Will tells him. “I was going to give you the jacket back, but I kept forgetting--”

“I wasn’t going to give the sweatshirt back.” Max says. 

“--and they think you gave it to me permanently.”

Steve’s plan had not been to delegate an article of clothing for each child to symbolize a profound friendship or anything like that. His plan had been to warm Will up and cover Max’s bloody shirt. Apparently, though, each kid secretly has a desire to steal one of his shirts or jackets or scarves like the one Lucas is eyeing. 

He wonders if this is a sibling thing. Like, now that he automatically has six younger siblings does that mean he loses six things from his closet? Did Nancy and Jonathan make this sacrifice? Is this something everyone knows about except for him? Does he even care?

The answer is no, he doesn’t care. That stupid letter jacket had only ever been a reminder of King Steve until now, where it serves as a reminder that he helped Will feel better for even a second. He’d always thought of the green sweatshirt as lucky, but Max needs more luck than him anyways. Steve is _glad_ he can give things to the kids. He’d give them the house if they wanted it. 

Steve shrugs and rolls onto his back.

“There’s a leather jacket in there somewhere with your name on it, El.”

**Author's Note:**

> my starlight angel em and i decided to take the same idea for a fic and both write one for each other!!! the idea was the kids stealing steve's clothes and it was so fun to write also GO READ HERS over at floralathena because it is phenomenal. 
> 
> title is from hand-me-down tune by the avett brothers!
> 
> im on tumblr @bi-harrington if you wanna talk or something


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